Posted a half day ago by Walter Kirn:

“Many years ago the New York Times paid all my expenses and held out a nice check on the simple condition that I hang out for a few days with David Lynch and write up the experience.

“I did the hanging-out part, but it didn’t really amount to an experience. I couldn’t get a grip on him, at all. Because there was nothing to grip.

“I’m not saying he was shallow, more that he was truly elusive, meaning the ‘self’ that was in there, supposedly, was simply that of an artist in his off hours. Which is like the self of a vaccum cleaner in its off hours. Meaning it just sits there.

“In Lynch’s case, he smoked and drank coffee while he just sat there. And sometimes he said something. Nothing memorable.

“Anyway, the assignment completely defeated me in a way that no other magazine assignment ever has. I think I’ll write about this at greater length soon, this non-experience I had with someone so eccentric he didn’t even come off as an eccentric, but suffice it to say I’m sorry to hear he’s gone. He kept alive in the minds of millions the figure of the artist, the artist as individual, useless to society at large and therefore invaluable to all.”

At noon on 1.20.25, Orange Plague will be inaugurated inside the Capital rotunda. No, I haven’t the slightest interest in watching. (YouTube clips will suffice.) Horrid cold temperatures have forced the ceremony, which normally happens outdoors on the nippy Capitol steps, to huddle inside.

The same deal prevailed 40 years ago when Ronald Reagan‘s second-term inauguration happened under the Capitol dome.

Washington, D.C, was covered in several inches of snow — essentially a coating of “ice-nine” — during JFK’s inauguration.

Last night I spoke with HE’s “Eddie Ginley” about what the recent BAFTA and PGA nominations portend. And Ginley’s basic money term was that Best Picture Oscars are fundamentally about Big Swings.

What Ginley said, in essence, was that Best Picture Oscars are fundamentally about Big Swings.

What Ginley said, in essence, was that Sean Baker can and should be celebrated, but he can’t win a Best Picture Oscar…very sorry…because Anora, obviously his finest film, isn’t enough of a Big Swing. It’s too Brooklyn, too Russian, too slapstick, too boozy and lap-dancey… right? It doesn’t, like, “say” anything.

This, at least, is what your basic industry dullards appear to feel, according to Ginley. To them it doesn’t matter if a Big Swing movie hits the ball long and hard. Babe Ruth swings don’t have to pay off in a sweet-smell-of-success fashion. All that matters to the none-too-brights is that a filmmaker said “no half-measures or standard strategies…here comes my go-for-broke Stanley Kubrick or Andrej Tarkovsky or trans Stanley Donen film!”

Hats off because Jacques Audiard and Brady Corbet picked up that big fat bat and swung hard! Big concept, drug cartel guy goes trans, long length, overture, intermission, etc. Okay, so they only got a piece of the ball and maybe hit a line drive or a pop-up. Doesn’t matter!

What matters is the ambition, the hunger, the size of the dream and the pretensions and the fevered imaginings that were poured into it. Don’t tell us about smart tap-dancers and brainy popcorns and soul baths that leave audiences in states of soothe and groove…toss that stuff aside, they’re saying.

Eff those guys.

Anora, Conclave, A Complete Unknown…these are the “sing” movies…clear water and unpretentious nourishment….movies that work.

Warning: I’m heartbroken about the static disturbance sounds in these two mp3 recordings, which last about 30 minutes each. I’ll have to figure another way of recording. My trusty digicorder served me well for so many years…no longer!

Last night HE commenter “Nerf” wrote the following about the late, great David Lynch:

For the most part, “things just got repetitive” is a four-word description of what every auteur-level filmmaker tends to go through over the course of a decades-long career.

That is to say that he / she winds up making the same film or certainly the same KIND of thematically-driven film (i.e., drawn from the same inner soul pool or creative wellspring) over and over. They just emerge in this or that varying form, in some instances with greater degrees of refinement.

“A director only makes one film in his life, and then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again” — Jean Renoir.

Because despite whatever annoyance or discomfort this state of affairs may provoke in guys like Bob Hightower (“stop talking about peak periods!”) the artist has only a finite amount of psychic essence to draw from.

And that’s primarily why creative peak periods (the full, robust and unfettered emergence of creative servings or statements or heavy-cat formulations) tend to manifest most often when the artist has gotten the trial-and-error or youthful indulgence stuff out of the way and has begun to develop serious command over what he / she has inside, usually starting during his / her late 20s or early 30s.

And then it all starts to wind down during his / her early 60s. Or a bit sooner or later. Ask Pedro Almodovar about this. Ask Alfred Hitchcock, for whom the tank mostly ran dry after The Birds. (No, Frenzy wasn’t a creative rebirth — it was an opportunity for Hitch to get more sexually graphic while re-connecting with some of that old London energy.) Ask Oliver Stone, whose creative powers began to dissipate after Any Given Sunday (‘99).

If only this could’ve happened to poor Buster Keaton, whose creative glory period ENDED around age 34 or 35, when sound came in during the late 1920s.

Exceptions will sometimes occur, as Paul Schrader once pointed out, when a film artist experiences a growth spurt due to some kind of tragedy or trauma (i.e., George Stevens or James Stewart’s experiences in Europe during World War II). In which case the psychic essence trove is reenergized or freshly reflected upon.

Obviously (a) variations abound and (b) this formula doesn’t generally apply to big-time rock musicians like Bob Dylan or David Bowie or Paul McCartney, all of whom were cooking with gas beginning in their early 20s if not younger.

In 2014 Lynch, then in his late 60s, was asked when a new feature film might emerge, and he said something along the lines of “I’ve got shards and slivers and segments in my head, but I don’t have THE BIG IDEA…I just don’t have that yet.”’

Surely Lynch knew deep down that big ideas are generally not ripe for plucking when artists are in their late autumnal years. It just doesn’t work that way.